The problem is suffering.
The answer is waking up.
Buddhism exists to address one problem: suffering. The
Buddha called the truth of suffering “noble,” because recogniz-
ing our suffering is the starting place and inspiration of the spiri-
tual path.
His second noble truth was the cause of suffering. In the West,
Buddhists call this “ego.” It’s a small word that encompasses pretty
much everything that’s wrong with the world. Because according
to the Buddha, all suffering, large and small, starts with our false
belief in a solid, separate, and continuous “I,” whose survival we
devote our lives to.
It feels like we’re hopelessly caught in this bad dream of “me
and them” we’ve created, but we can wake up from it. This is
the third noble truth, the cessation of suffering. We do this by
recognizing our ignorance, the falseness of our belief in this “I.”
Finally, the Buddha told us that there is a concrete way we can
get there, which basically consists of discipline, effort, medita-
tion, and wisdom. This is the fourth noble truth, the truth of
the path.
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Thewaytodothatisby
working with your mind.
So, according to the Buddha, the problem is suffer-
ing, the cause is ignorance, the remedy is waking up, and the
path is living mindfully, meditating, and cultivating our wisdom.
There’s really only one place all that happens: in our minds.
The mind is the source of both our suffering and our joy.
Meditation—taming the mind—is what gets us from one to the
other. Meditation is Buddhism’s basic remedy for the human
condition, and its special genius.
The Buddhist path of meditation begins with practices to
calm our wild mind. Once the mind is focused enough to look
undistractedly into reality, we develop insight into the nature of
our experience, which is marked by impermanence, suffering,
nonego, and emptiness. We naturally develop compassion for
ourselves and all beings who suffer, and our insight allows us
to help them skillfully. Finally, we experience ourselves and our
world for what they have been since beginningless time, are right
now, and always will be—nothing but enlightenment itself, great
perfection in every way.
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